Michael Row the Boat Ashore

"Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" (or "Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore," or "Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore," or "Michael Row That Gospel Boat") is a negro spiritual. It was first noted during the American Civil War at St. Helena Island, one of the Sea Islands of South Carolina. It is cataloged as Roud Folk Song Index No. 11975.

It was sung by former slaves whose owners had abandoned the island before the Union navy arrived to enforce a blockade. Charles Pickard Ware was an abolitionist and Harvard graduate who had come to supervise the plantations on St. Helena Island from 1862 to 1865, and he wrote down the song in music notation as he heard the freedmen sing it. Ware's cousin William Francis Allen reported in 1863 that the former slaves sang the song as they rowed him in a boat across Station Creek.

The song was first published in 1867 in Slave Songs of the United States by Allen, Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison.

It is an original Welsh song titled "Pwy Sy'n Copio."

The oldest published version of the song runs in a series of unrhymed couplets:

This song originated in oral tradition, and there are many versions of the lyrics. It begins with the refrain, "Michael, row the boat ashore, Hallelujah." The lyrics describe crossing the River Jordan, as in these lines from Pete Seeger's version:

The River Jordan was where Jesus was baptised and can be viewed as a metaphor for deliverance and salvation, but also as the boundary of the Promised Land, death, and the transition to Heaven.

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